Splash Sports aims to create communities around media personalities to rival sportsbooks

In an era where companies DraftKings and FanDuel dominate the sports gaming industry with massive resources, a new platform has emerged that seeks to shift the focus away from beating the sportsbooks and more toward creating a community and connecting media personalities and social media influencers with their fans and followers.

While traditional sportsbooks pit gamblers against complex computer algorithms and professional traders to ensure that the house comes out on top and secures profit in the long run, Splash Sports has developed a real-money gaming platform where communities compete against each other and/or a media personality, putting the focus on the community and competition instead of beating the book.

“Sportsbooks have to win 57 percent of the time, otherwise their business fails,” Splash Sports CMO Kyle Christensen said. “We consider ourselves agnostic. We’re a marketplace. We’re trying to bring commissioners and players together – we don’t care who wins, at the end of the day.”

Splash Sports has developed a platform that allows social media influencers and media personalities to serve as commissioners of their own leagues and contests, connecting them to their community of followers and allowing that community to compete together in things like survivor contests or pick ’em games. And community is an important point of emphasis.

“While the game itself is really a piece of content, we want these communities to stay together,” Christensen said. “We see this evolving into something that’s much more than just playing games, but creating communities that people can engage with time after time.”

The concept might not be new as survivor and pick ’em contests have been around for years. But Splash Sports has created a platform that, as Christensen puts it, “takes away all of the crappy things about being a commissioner,” like collecting fees, making sure the rules are right, and paying out entries. And this can also be quite lucrative for the commissioners.

“Commissioners are the lifeblood of everything that we do. They are the ones that are sending out the invites. They are the ones that are sort of building this mass following. So we want to make sure and reward them, and reward them well,” Christensen said. “We want to make it so that if you’re an influencer and you’re making money on YouTube or TikTok, if you were to create a game on Splash Sports and then do some promotion around it, you’ll make some serious coin, and we’ve had a lot of people do it.”

Some commissioners, like one who goes by the moniker ForTheFans, have already made between $5,000 and $25,000 using Splash Sports. ForTheFans runs a season-long Survivor which has . Beginning as just a contest among college buddies several years ago, the ForTheFans survivor contest has grown significantly over the years, and Splash Sports now helps facilitate it.

“It’s still early, but Splash is building out a lot of features that both myself and our players want. They have taken the burden of collecting the entry fees, keeping the pot safe, paying out the users quickly and keeping track of everything,” ForTheFans said. “That was the biggest challenge for me. It was becoming a lot to do. Now our contests are able to grow with Splash and it doesn’t require nearly as much busy work from me.”

The platform is relatively new, debuting publicly for the 2023 NFL season. Splash Sports will continue to expand its offering to NBA and NHL in time for the start of the season and will include college football in time for bowl season.